


Snow

by tariana



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Fluff, M/M, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-30
Updated: 2018-07-30
Packaged: 2019-06-19 01:24:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15499191
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tariana/pseuds/tariana
Summary: Ron contemplates Harry. Emotional range of a teaspoon, my ass.





	Snow

When Harry is cold, his scar stands out more. Everything about him stands out more. His pale skin seems even paler, except for his cheeks, which flush almost prettily. The contrast of pale skin and black hair is striking, and seems to make his green eyes huge and almost luminous. Today, his hair is even more mussed than usual, and there are snowflakes in it. I was close enough to see the individual snowflakes, as he helped me brush off the snow from the snowball he hit me with just moments ago.

His breath fogs as it comes out of his mouth – he is breathing hard from the cold and the exertion of the snowball fight, and I watch the rapid puffs of steam emerging from those lips for a moment. His laughter joins that of Fred and George, and even Hermione has been coaxed away from her OWL revising by the still-falling snow. Ginny is trapped inside by a sore throat, her sentence enforced by the strictest jailer of all – our mother. Harry’s laughter is a rare, precious thing for me – I hear it all too infrequently, and I tuck the memory of Harry in the snow, pink-cheeked and laughing, into my heart. 

Fred aims a snowball at George, but George dodges at the last second, and the hard-flung missile smashes Hermione right in the face. She gasps with the cold, and brushes at the snow clinging to her, without much success. Her long brown hair is full of snow – the texture of her hair seems to be great for catching snowflakes – and her face is very red. For a moment, I think she is going to give Fred an earful, but she just laughs, bends to scoop up snow, and runs after Fred, who runs away calling that she’ll never catch him. She does, and he soon winds up with a fistful of snow down the back of his cloak. When he turns to look at her, with his own retaliatory handful of snow, something passes between them – just a look in Fred’s eyes for a second – a look that Hermione returns after a beat, looking surprised and pleased. Fred, who has never been serious about anything in his entire life, cannot seriously fancy Hermione, but he can certainly appreciate a pretty girl when he sees one – he does it often enough. She does look beautiful today, I have to admit, with her hair tumbling around unrestrained, and her face flushed from the cold, and smiling radiantly up at Fred. 

A year ago, I would have been insane with jealousy if anyone else, let alone my own brother, had made Hermione look at them like that. Looks like that should be reserved for me, I thought. And while I can recognize Hermione’s beauty for what it is – the beauty of someone who has grown comfortable with herself and is confident in her own skin, her beauty does not inspire in me the feelings that it once would have. Today, and for some months now, those feelings have been inspired by another – someone with mussed dark hair and bright green eyes, someone who smiles too rarely and laughs almost never, someone who stole my heart when he reclaimed, at the bottom of a lake, what had been stolen from him . I was the thing he would miss most, and suddenly he was that thing for me, too.

Standing there in the snow, I watch Harry watching Fred and Hermione. He looks a little sad, as he often does these days, and I wonder what exactly he is thinking. I reckon he senses my eyes on him, because he turns and looks at me. Something flashes in his eyes for a second... or is it just wishful thinking – me wanting so badly to see him look at me the way Fred just looked at Hermione? To look at me like he has just noticed something rare and bright amidst his familiar everyday world? I may be the thing he would miss the most, but I am only his best mate, nothing more. That is so much more than I ever expected – to be Harry Potter’s best mate – that asking for anything more almost seems... childish.

His scarf blows out behind him as he walks to join the others, who have moved somewhat further out in the yard to a patch of untrodden snow. Then he turns back to me again. “Come on, Ron,” he calls, and I jog lightly out to join him. 

As ever, I leave so many things unsaid. So many words, so many thoughts, all held inside my heart where they are safe. Will there be a day for saying them, for revealing my thoughts? I don’t know. I hope there will be – I hope I can say to my best mate what he means to me – all that he means to me. 

For now, I will wait and watch and wonder. I will wait until a day when I feel I must say these things – when I cannot wait any longer. I will watch Harry, looking for signs from him that will make me believe he wants me to say these things. 

I will wonder – does Harry wait, and watch, and wonder, too?


End file.
